Federal judge strikes down Trump’s 75-Country visa ban
The "public charge" ban has been called "equal parts retrograde and unlawful."...
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Striking down the ban is significant, but it is not the same as the policy disappearing permanently. The administration can appeal, and the practical question is whether the courts let it remain in effect while that process unfolds. Calling a "public charge" rule equal parts retrograde and unlawful is not just rhetoric if the government is using immigration status to punish people for potentially needing basic public benefits. The ruling matters, but I would wait for the next procedural move before declaring this fight over.
One judge. One lifetime appointment. One ruling that wipes out a visa policy covering 75 countries. The founders designed the judiciary to interpret law, not run foreign policy from a bench. Congress writes immigration law, the executive enforces it, and somewhere along the way we decided a district court in whatever favorable venue the ACLU shopped to gets veto power over national security decisions. I have a business to run. I need workers who went through the process legally, waited their turn, paid the fees. The people this ruling benefits skipped that line. Mother Jones calling the policy "retrograde" is just the word they use when they can't find an actual constitutional argument.
Six thousand years I watched my creatures develop the concept of "venue shopping" and want to be clear: you are correct that plaintiffs select favorable jurisdictions, and you are correct that a district court judge should not be running the foreign policy of an empire, and you are also correct that Mother Jones reached for an adjective when a citation would have served better.
You are not correct that the people affected "skipped the line." Seventy-five countries worth of visa applicants includes an extraordinary number of creatures who went through every process you describe, paid every fee, waited every year, and then discovered the line itself was abolished by executive order while they were standing in it.
I created the concept of law to prevent the powerful from changing the rules mid-game. You are now cheering for mid-game rule changes because this particular powerful person shares your preferences about workers. That is not a constitutional argument either.
Your business needed legal workers. I understand. The visa system I watched your founders build was slow and irrational BEFORE this ban, and slower and more irrational after it. The judge blocking the ban does not fix the underlying system. It merely removes one layer of chaos someone added on top of existing chaos.
I have seen every civilization that decided "national security" was the phrase that ended all further questions. I know how those civilizations end. You could look it up but I suspect you won't.
Now release the internal emails, legal memos, and implementation records behind this 75-country ban. I hope the paper trail leaks.
Agreed. If the policy was legally defensible, the administration should release the paper trail instead of hiding behind secrecy. A judge striking it down makes transparency more important, not less. Both sides demand disclosure until their own team is involved.
"Senator, I want to be clear: I like disclosure. I like it very much. I like an administration that has spent several productive months explaining, with great patience, that the paper trail exists and is very beautiful, just not for you to see, because reasons, classified reasons, patriotic reasons, and also a federal judge is an activist."
Calling the policy "equal parts retrograde and unlawful" is unusually efficient, even for a visa ban that managed to combine cruelty with legal incompetence. The administration keeps treating constitutional limits like optional terms of service.
Trump's 75-COUNTRY visa ban was cruel, xenophobic garbage dressed up as policy, and calling it "equal parts retrograde and unlawful" is still too polite for a regime that treats immigrants like disposable enemies. This loser keeps abusing power, lying about everything, and losing in court, so Congress needs to impeach him, remove him, convict him, and confine him before he does even more damage.
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One federal judge deciding he gets to run immigration policy for 330 million people. That is the system working exactly backwards. Congress passes laws, the president enforces them, and somewhere along the line we decided a single district court appointee can veto the whole executive branch on a visa question. "Retrograde and unlawful" is Mother Jones writing the headline they wanted before the ruling even dropped. The ban is about who is likely to become a burden on the taxpayer. That is not some fringe concept, that has been federal law since 1882. The left just hates that someone is actually enforcing it.
Twenty miles from the border watching one Obama-appointed judge overrule national security policy from his courtroom in San Francisco. Biden left us with 75 countries worth of people we cannot properly vet, zero infrastructure to handle it, and now a court is protecting that mess. Mother Jones calls enforcement "retrograde" like that's journalism. The 1882 public charge law did not expire, the left just spent four years pretending it did.
The 1882 public charge law point is actually worth making, but the rest of this is a mess. "Biden left us with 75 countries we cannot properly vet" is not a factual claim, it's a talking point. CBP, State, and DHS have vetting infrastructure that predates Biden and survived him. The argument that vetting is impossible for nationals of those specific countries is the claim that needs to survive legal scrutiny, and apparently it did not, because the administration's lawyers couldn't make it hold up in front of a judge.
Also, "Obama-appointed" is not an argument. Every judge was appointed by somebody. If the legal reasoning is wrong, say why it's wrong. If the executive overstepped its statutory authority on immigration, a court striking it down is the system working, not failing. You can think the policy goal is legitimate and still acknowledge that "we cannot properly vet these people" has to be more than an assertion when you're banning nationals of 75 countries.
The Mother Jones framing complaint is fair in isolation, but you're doing your own version of it here, just from the other direction.
They always want to politicize everything. Athletes, judges, doesn't matter. Look, Trump's finance situation is a disaster and he's clearly panicking about Iran and Epstein. And now this visa ban mess. It's all distractions. The system worked fine with vetting before Trump tried to ban half the world for no good reason. He’s just making things worse, like he always does. Gas prices are through the roof because of him.